


Midnight Conversations

by Lobotomite



Series: HDM AU [2]
Category: Emmerdale
Genre: HDM AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-25
Updated: 2017-12-25
Packaged: 2019-02-20 06:40:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13141176
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lobotomite/pseuds/Lobotomite
Summary: Aaron is used to waking up in the middle of the night. It's been a while since he's had to worry about waking up anyone else, though, and he ends up having his first real conversation with Alex's daemon late at night.





	Midnight Conversations

**Author's Note:**

> This is set in an au based on the His Dark Materials trilogy by Phillip Pullman; basically all the background knowledge you need for this is that everyone in this world has a physical personification of their soul in the form of an animal, called a daemon, and these daemons have independent thoughts and feelings to their humans and can speak English. For the purposes of this fic, pretty much everything has happened as it did in canon, just with daemons being there for it. 
> 
> It's not stated in the fic, but Alex's daemon is a capybara, and Aaron's is a rat.

Aaron is no stranger to waking up in the middle of the night - however, it has been a long time since he woke up with an arm loose around his waist and warm, even breaths against the back of his neck. He stretches as well as he can without jostling Alex awake, flexing his feet and rolling his shoulders, and he's about to settle in and try and eke out a few more hours of sleep when he sees Solana's head raise and realises he must have woken her.

"Sorry," he whispers sheepishly, "I didn't mean to wake you up."

She rests her head back on her front feet, and it's too dark for him to make out her features, but he can still feel her calm gaze on him. Every person's daemon reflects them to some extent, but Alex and Solana are especially similar; she emanates calmness and understanding just like he does, minus Alex's endearing awkwardness. When she looks at you it feels like she already understands anything you could tell her.

"It's fine," she replies quietly. "Are you alright?" His instinct is to bristle, to close off and protect himself from judgement, but Alex is so comforting wrapped around him, and they've reacted so well to everything he's let them in on already, that the urge is gone as quickly as it came.

"Yeah. I don't sleep great, is all. I wasn't thrashing about, was I?" God, he hopes not. He still remembers the first time he'd woken up Ed and Winona with a nightmare and, much more mortifyingly, the first time he'd woken Robert and Cordelia. He'd really prefer not to have woken Solana and almost woken Alex the second time Alex slept over.

"No, don't worry. We've just always been light sleepers - we shared a room with our little brother, and we'd always end up waking up whenever he did." Aaron can't help the way his brows crease - Alex? A light sleeper? The same Alex who passed out during Top Gear and slept right through two teenagers tromping around the house? - and she can either see better than him or she's aware of what he must be thinking, because she chuckles quietly. "Not lately, of course. I'd never have believed he could sleep this much before he started working at the hospital."

"It must be exhausting," Aaron says sympathetically. That was all he intended to say, but there's something about them that makes it almost too easy to be truthful, so he follows it with, "Why... um, why do you bother? Dragging yourselves here after eighteen-hour shifts just to make the trip back the next morning?"

"Because we like you," she says, calm and matter-of-fact, as if volunteering something like that isn't terrifying in it's vulnerability. As if that could be true enough to justify the effort. And the part that has Aaron's heart skipping a beat and a happy warmth spread through his chest is that he's pretty sure it's actually true.

"I really like you, too," he whispers, feeling his face blush red, and she does that weird thing daemons sometimes do, where you can tell they would be smiling if they could.

"Goodnight, Aaron," she says, and it would be easy (for him, anyway) to take it as a brush off or a dismissal; but her and Alex are so demonstrably not one for playing games, have been so steadfast in communicating and making clear where they stand, that he takes it in the spirit he's confident it was intended and cuddles into Alex's loose hold.

"Goodnight," he says back, and for the first time in a long time, it really is.


End file.
